I have a fellow theater/writer friend to thank for pointing out one Sean Dietrich, writer/storyteller. She’s been a fan for a while. I’ve read a few of his blogs and watched a YouTube clip. Then she and I recently attended one of his performances.
Of course, being writers, we hit the merch table to buy books before we ever even hear the guy speak. I picked up his memoir, Will the Circle Be Unbroken: A Memoir of Learning to Believe You're Gonna Be Okay.
I gave the cover a quick skim and think, “Wow. He’s been through some stuff, but I don’t know about that subtitle.” Because I’m a cynic in survival mode, I wanted to read it to prove him wrong on those words to the right of the colon. I’m also a cynic in survival mode who could use a little bit of hope.
So I paid for the book and stuffed it in my bag, then we found our seats to enjoy the show.
Sean’s style is folksy and nostalgic—like sitting with a friend on a front porch swing, reminiscing about the good ol’ days while the lemonade glass sweats condensation onto your pants in all the wrong places.
Sean moved seamlessly from song parodies, old-time favorites, and stories of growing up in the deepwater conservative South. The audience, mostly of a certain, um… demographic, hung on his every word. I might have been among the younger ones in the building, and I’m not young. But having spent a good deal of my childhood under my grandparents’ watchful eyes—and stubborn ways—the stories landed quite nicely.
When he broke into “The Old Rugged Cross,” the Brown County Playhouse theater in 2026 fell away to Grandma’s little country church, circa 1980s.
I sit next to my childhood best friend on a hard wooden pew that made my hind end ache for the preaching to be over with. Our little sandaled feet swing back and forth, toes dirty from outside play (you can dress the girls up, but…)
We share a battered green hardback hymnal, but we don’t need it. We know the words.
At least I do:
On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross
I watch our gray-haired preacher lead the singing, his arm bopping up and down…
The emblem of suff’ring and shame,
His wife is barely visible behind a bouquet of fresh flowers cut from a country garden and stuffed lovingly into a vase and plopped on top of the piano…
And I love that old cross where the dear stand best
Grandma fills in at the organ, her knobby fingers finding their way over two levels of keys—and missing several notes—as my little-kid mind creates the scene: a cross, on a hill, with deer standing proudly all around while the sun sets in a brilliant orange sky behind it all…
For a world of lost sinners was slain.
Little me wiggles some more and hopes the sermon won’t be wordy as I belt out the words…
The wrong words, turns out, but my tiny heart was in it.
I was adult years old when I learned the lyrics were actually “where the Dearest and Best” and not “where the dear stand best.”
But those are the words now. The image of that hill with the cross and the deer that floods my vision when that song pops into my day.
Back in 2026, it’s intermission. I read the cover of the memoir more thoroughly. And it hits me: This guy has survived some stuff and he’s got this career and I want to know how he got from “stuff and survival” to “writer with a career.”
My writer’s block is quite solid. The universe is dishing out trial upon trial. I have one brain cell that gets tossed between Little Miss Muse, cats with hairballs, and the washing machine holding a load that’s needed to be changed around for a couple of days now.
Rewashed. It needs to be rewashed.
Anyway, I want to know how Mr. Dietrich still writes through it all and manages to make sense. Perhaps he has three brain cells. One for his muse, one for his critters, and one to remember to change the laundry.
I devoured his memoir in just a couple of sessions.
And I found the closest thing to finding someone who might get it. Not the cure to my writing block, per se, but someone who… just knows how things go in a writer’s brain.
Sean Dietrich writes in Will the Circle Be Unbroken, “…I found that the act of writing was like exhaling after holding my breath for a hundred years... you’d be hard pressed to find many men who are more screwed up than me. And that is why I write.”
I’m carrying around a two-ton elephant of a block as life keeps tossing hand grenades onto my live mine field.
I clench. A lot.
I brace. A lot.
And I hold my breath. A lot.
I have done these things since I was a kid.
I’ve also written since I was that little kid with dirty feet stuffed into tiny white sandals singing the wrong words to church hymns.
Painting pictures in my mind of hills and deer and sunsets and conjuring up worlds of fantasy and fiction.
Places to exhale until I can learn to believe it’s gonna be okay.
It’s gonna be okay… Someday.
And those are the words now.
